The Short Coat: An Inside Look at Getting Into and Getting Through Medical School
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The Short Coat: An Inside Look at Getting Into and Getting Through Medical School
The HONEST guide to medical school, featuring real students from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine–skip this show if you’d rather not know (and hate laughter)!
Recent Episodes
450 episodes
These Iowa PA Students Are Riding 68 Miles for Cancer Prevention (BONUS EP)
Isabel Ahmann, Alex Fouts, and Nia Tanui, and Giana Michels just survived their first year of PA school alongside the MDs, and to celebrate they're ri...
Roshan Sethi on Med School Simpering and Making It in Hollywood
Radiation oncologist and director Roshan Sethi: confidence in medicine is mostly performance.
The book club is back, and M2...
Medicine is Changing. Step Up and Shape It
As societies and governments wrestle with the rise of artificial intelligence, The Short coats sit down with Dr. Lindsey Knake, a CCOM alum neonatolog...
The No-Guilt Summer: Med Students Finally Breathe
It's freeform Friday on the pod, which means the Iowa City parking situation is excellent, the rising M2s are bored and slightly guilty about it, and...
Game of Med School — We Actually Made It
Can The Short Coats make a card game that captures the twists and turns of medical school? Well, we've given it a try, and now we finally play it — th...
Foreign Competition for Residency: The Data vs. The Rhetoric
The $100,000 H-1b visa fee landed in September 2025 like a fire alarm in the hallways of medicine—hospitals panicked, advocacy groups mobilized, and a...
Med School Stereotypes Shattered: What We’re Really Like Inside (Recess Rehash)
We've all got that mental image of medical students – the type-A perfectionists grinding through textbooks even on the porcelain throne, right? Well,...
From EKG Meltdowns to OSCE Roller Coasters (or Treadmills): '25-26 Med School Vibes Recap
The Carver Carnival is the Carver College of Medicine's unofficial exhale — an end-of-year celebration where students who have been running on caffein...
MD/PhD: The Long Game of Medicine and Research
Riley Behan-Bush found the MD/PhD program through a Google search. Hannah Van Ert had already started a career in nursing before a research lab change...
Iowa City Haunts and Med School Hot Takes
For the full list of our favorite places, visit https://theshortcoat.com/haunts.
Iowa City is small enough that you can bike from the h...
Medical Students Judge Reddit’s Messiest Dilemmas (AITA)
Dave and his M1 co-hosts Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer, take a field trip to Reddit's AITA sub— because self-reflection...
Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It
Four medical students— Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer— talk through how they landed on their "last free summer ever" plan...
The Doctor Doesn't Know Either: Inside the Diagnostic Crisis
The feedback loop that would make doctors better diagnosticians doesn’t exist.
Louise walked five minutes. Then her legs tu...
Blechardy Returns: Trivia, Wet Dog Beans, and Bad Guesses
When the prize for a correct answer might be a poop-flavored jelly bean, getting it wrong is the best strategy.
What if you...
"Ego Death?!" M4s Talk Audition Rotations
How Away Rotations play into getting that dream residency
Among all the strange things about medical school, there’s the so...
What are Med Students Reading: Book Club!
If reading makes better docs, these guys will be incredible.
What if the cure for doctor-speak was actually just… reading m...
Medical Student Identity: What the White Coat Means
The Hippocratic oath moment that turns anxious students into future physicians—even before they’ve treated a single patient
...
From Fire Hose to Final Decision–How Med Students Choose Careers (Recess Rehash)
[Last week was Spring Break here at Iowa. It was also Match Week, so this rerun from last year is worth a second look!]
P...
Step Exams: Ready Or Not Here They Come
Three exams that might drive you crazy.
If you’re a pre-med, you may have heard about Step exams. But what are they? When t...
The Med School Traditions That Make Lifelong Bonds
Building community through experiences
Tradition is a big part of medical school–med students willingly tie themselves to c...
Things You Can Do To Prepare for Med School (and One Thing You Shouldn’t!)
Prioritize Fun!
What should you do with the time between getting accepted to medical school and orientation week? Fallon J...
Choosing a Professional Identity: Beyond Medical School Classes
How medical schools help students figure out what kind of doctor they’ll be.
Looking at medical school and wondering what y...
Med Students on Long Distance Love: Does It Last?
When medical school forces couples apart, students face tough realities
Medical students dish on the messy, tender, and sur...
Medical Students and Love: Do Their Spouses Really Know Them?
The Heart Wants What It Wants.
In this Valentine’s Day episode, four medical students sit down to play the ultimate compati...
Med Students React: Social Media from Helpful to Hogwash
Slather some beef tallow on it.
On this episode, M3 Fallon Jung, M1s Isa Perez-Sandi and Cory Karasek, and M2 Maria Schapfe...
The Surprising Connection Between Hobbies and Medicine
Don’t give up the outside activities that’ll make you a better doc
As Dave has observed many times, medicine will take ever...
Med Students Take the Hot Nugget Challenge
[Content warning: Dave did his best to remove sniffles.]
Spicy chicken nuggets, bad decisions, and what happens when medica...
Tips and Tricks for Crushing it in Clerkships
What to expect for med students moving from classroom to exam room
The beginning of clerkships mark a medical student’s pro...
They Way Most Docs are Paid Doesn’t Lead to Healthier Patients (Recess Rehash)
[ICYMI, here’s a rerun of a show released earlier this year. We’ll be back with new shows starting next week!]
How the sys...
Demand to Be Called ‘Doctor,’ or Let It Slide (AITA)? (Recess Rehash)
[It’s winter break, and everything has come to a halt here, including podcasting. We’ll be back soon, promise!]
Reddit’s “...
Another Path to Med School: Masters of Clinical Anatomy
An alternative to postbac programs?
Postbac programs are okay, but what if there was another path to medical school? M2s Sa...
The Unexpected Power of Student Doctors (Recess Rehash)
[We weren’t available to record a new show for you this week, so enjoy this rerun instead!]
Clinical students are sometimes...
How to Survive The First Semester of Med School
These M1s say it wasn’t easy…but it was FUN?
You know medical school is hard, but what does that mean? That idea has no em...
Family expectations, culture clashes, and career priorities: Who’s the A-Hole? (Recess Rehash)
[Due to Thanksgiving break, we have no new episode this week for you, but here’s a good one from our back catalog!]
When yo...
The Universal Experience that Medicine Hates Talking About Most
[Content warning: this episode contains frank discussions of death and dying that some listeners may want to skip.]
Doctors...
Harsh Truth: Most Pre-Meds Don’t Get Accepted
Three med students who didn’t get in at first talk about why.
Thousands of med school applicants are going to feel the sti...
The Rural Doc Crisis and the Med Students Who Plan to Be Where They’re Most Needed
The Truths and Solutions for Small-Town Healthcare. We’re talking about rural medicine, where the needs are huge, the systems are broken, and sometime...
Med Student Leaders: Juggling Roles at School and Home
Is “work-life balance” is a myth in medical school? What do successful students do to manage leadership positions, marriage, kids, and academics? Our...
Med School Stereotypes Shattered: What We’re Really Like Inside
Turns out medical students are regular humans who happen to need to memorize the Krebs cycle. We’ve all got that mental image of medical students – t...
My Family Thinks I’m a Doctor Already
What med students wish their families actually understood about medical school. Your family means well… but when you start med school, suddenly every...